f I timed it right, I’d make all the lights and speed down Folsom with no hands, the city a foggy blur I glided through on my commute into the office. But such mornings were rare. San Francisco is full of so much I didn’t want to miss. A freshly painted mural outside Philz Coffee on the corner of 24th Street; a mother zipping up her daughter’s purple jacket on the porch of a remodeled Victorian duplex; a bearded man singing a song I couldn’t catch into a glass-bottle microphone. I’d take in all I could as the tunnel of Chinese elms along the southern stretch of the street thinned out and I approached the 101 underpass. With cars rumbling overhead, I’d fix my gaze straight, toward the glass high-rises, and grip my handlebars tight as Folsom arced into SoMa.

Content review, I corrected, a term that cast the work as more professional, at least in my eyes. I added that I also helped implement clever in-app solutions for users struggling with serious issues: cutters and anorexics, the depressed and the bullied. If you included “suicidal” in your dating profile, for instance, a pop-up appeared with a link to a website of helpful resources. Out of twenty thousand users who typed “suicidal,” five percent tapped the link. That’s one thousand lives I may have saved. Incredible scale.

He cracked open a Red Bull. “The VCs want us to hire more engineers, maybe a designer. But we might be able to bring on a contractor to help you for a few months.” He took a swig and switched into his friend voice, the looser cadence I remembered from our early days together, right out of college, before he’d written a line of code for DateDate. “A new roastery just opened on 7th and Folsom. A kiosk out of a garage, nothing flashy, but the coffee is superb.”

We’d met in a café in Palo Alto, where the owner, an old man from Trieste, introduced us as espresso purists. “No nonsense with the two of you,” he’d said, waving a hand at the flavored syrups that lined his bar, a compromise he made to compete with the Starbucks down the street. When I learned that the Founder dropped out of Stanford as a junior, I immediately respected him. He had edge. It was one thing to find success as a Stanford grad, and another thing entirely to find success as a dropout. Plus, I was excited that I finally had someone to talk coffee with, even if I was ashamed of my bougie interest.

At the bar, someone was singing Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own,” a song I would never stream on Rdio because it wasn’t compatible with my publicly visible aesthetic preferences, but which I secretly loved. The mood of the song made me feel expansive.

It seemed Allie didn’t know many people at the meetup, either. Her roommates were alums of Ivy League universities, and most of the people here were recent transplants from “back East,” thrilled to be in “San Fran.” Allie suggested we take a walk. On our way out of the apartment, I overheard one guy attempting to impress someone by explaining that he’d passed on an offer from McKinsey in order to come out west and “risk everything.” The company he named employed more than five hundred people, hardly a startup.

After a few minutes of browsing, the tell-us-about-yourself questions took over the screen; answering a certain number allowed you to browse again. DateDate defied all rules about how to make an engaging app—“so much friction,” one early reviewer in TechCrunch stated—and yet our userbase continued to grow, and hardly anyone left. The Founder compared this friction to opening a good bottle of whisky—the slow process of removing the wax seal made you more desirous of what was inside. No need to rush. We were crafting the perfect experience of love.

I’d visited the Founder’s old apartment, in the Castro. But his first startup’s acquisition allowed him to upgrade. He moved to a multimillion-dollar penthouse in the Millennium Tower, a luxury condo building of blue-gray glass that has begun to sink into the young bay mud. An engineering problem, or an omen.

That one of the ocean,” she said, referring to the photo I’d taken in Bolinas, “is that the default desktop photo from the last OS?”

“No, I took that.” I pointed to the speck of a person visible at the photo’s edge. “That’s my friend.”

“It looks exactly like that one default photo. You know which one I’m talking about? You’d walk into the Apple Store and the computers would have it set as their background.” She pulled up the photo on her phone. She was right: the photo looked like mine, or mine looked like it. My Bolinas photo, the one I was most proud of, was an unintentional replica.

At the overpriced Mexican restaurant run by a white guy who’d spent three months in Oaxaca, we took complimentary shots of mezcal while waiting for tamales. It’d been a particularly rough morning in the content review queue, and I was feeling grateful for Noma. Since she’d come to work with us, she helped another part of me, one I tucked away at work, come out of hiding. “I feel more dimensional around you,” I said, which made her spit out her mezcal.

Noma lived in the Haight, home of the Grateful Dead, of Janis Joplin and the Summer of Love and Joan Didion. As I climbed Haight Street on my bike, a man with a long gray ponytail and tie-dyed sweatshirt crossed the street without looking. I veered around him. A hookah bar was blasting Jefferson Airplane. Outside a corner store, a guy with an acoustic guitar grumbled out a Bob Dylan song in front of a Bob Marley mural. I admire the San Francisco neighborhoods, like the Haight and North Beach, that refuse to change at the same velocity as the rest of the city. San Francisco is always zooming ahead at warp speed, light-years ahead of anywhere else in America, and yet there remain pockets of the city where everyone is content to live decades in the past.